Guild Wars 2

I have absolutely no problem with the difficulty of Arah. The main problem, however, is that many paths of the dungeon take at LEAST 1 hour, usually more like 2,3, or even 4 hours. Who has this much time to play through an explorable dungeon? I’m glad we tried and completed path 2 on SUNDAY because there’s absolutely no chance I can spend 3+ hours doing that on a weekday.

I think less trash mobs/less boss HP would do wonders for the instance, even if this came at the price of added difficulty. It’s not that we WIPED a lot, there’s just a lot to battle through.

Look around on the web for movies/guides about what you can do to skip/speed up your runs.

Path 3 is the shortest with a time of 30/45 min depending on your group and taking into account that you don’t fail at lupicus. It is possible doing this path killing only the a couple trash mobs between the 2nd boss and lupicus. 5/10 mobs max.

Path 2 is not long either and has the best wp for lupicus it takes my group a bit over an hour usually.

Both paths have relatively little trash that you actually have to kill (in a good group you can kill it quite fast, but in most it’s easier and faster to skip). That makes 2 arah runs in 90 min if done correct which is not much more then some of the longer dungeons like CoE when pugging.

I totaly agree!

I need to farm shards of zhaitan for my legendary and I feel allways this pain in my mind when i need to go Arah. Its just insane! Its not funny at all and it feels like a waste of time. If only there were some cool rewards but not. Like when you kill the freakin Giganticus Lupicus and he drops a white normal item, you open the chest and get 3 blues cammon!! At least one yellow?! And its not a little bit of karma that will make players wanting to make the dungeon that takes so much time.

And of corse there are some guides to make the dungeon faster. But all of them tell us to avoid this monster here and there. Use invisibility, smoke fieds or whatever. Wouldn’t it be funnier if you could do the dungeon killing all the mobs in 30-40 minutes or so? What kind of strategies are these? Arah must decrease in dificulty/time needed to complete.

It is just unfair comparing to those players that need shards from these fast dungeons that you can complete in 15 or 20 minutes. Arah takes at least 50 minutes in the easyest path! It is to much!

What Arah Exp needs is to STOP BUGGING! I hate spending so much time just to find out the Gate won’t open and you made it to the last boss.
Same goes for Personal Storylines!

STOP THE BUGS so the time is worth it!

I think a reasonable argument can be made for the length of an average dungeon run versus the rewards and the difficulty. Underworld in GW1 took many hours, making it impossible to do for a large group of players purely due to length.

And skipping most of the content… is that intended design?

No it doesn’t take a lot of time path path 3 can be done in 30-40mins, 1/2/4 can be done in around 1hr30mins obviously if it’s your first time it will take much longer

Arguments aside… most GW2 dungeons (unlike GW1 dungeons) only take pugs 45 mins on average which points to Arah being way outside the normal scope.

I think a reasonable argument can be made for the length of an average dungeon run versus the rewards and the difficulty. Underworld in GW1 took many hours, making it impossible to do for a large group of players purely due to length.

And skipping most of the content… is that intended design?

To its credit, it also had the biggest Pay out of any Elite area prior to DOA. And before the gimmicks were discovered, a DOA would also take most groups way more than 3 hours and could fail at any time if your UA got snared or KD’d while trying to let a bad pull reset. (and then it was game-over… no popping debt removal, no res’ing at WP, most ppl just rage quit and didn’t get the 4 titan gems that were the whole reason they joined).

Unfortunately, there’s no gimmicks for getting through Arah faster besides running past the trash … but you still have to fight a half dozen Bosses (or literally 2 dozen minibosses in Path1) that take 15 minutes per set b/c they have way too many Hitpoints. This is where I have to repeat the point that…. If your team hasn’t wiped while taking the first 50% of that mob’s HP’s off, 90% of the time, you’re not gonna wipe for the last 50% either. So every path except path 3 could probably stand a massive HP nerf on all these mobs, the Elites especially.

There is NO disagreement on this anywhere. Even in Beta this was the #1 issue with all dungeons and the #1 complaint that Anet never responded to. They respond to every other complaint, bugs especially. But they have yet to address the #1 complaint that huge boring HP-pool timsinks are not fun (and were extremely rare in GW1).

The reason for Arah’s difficulty and length is because it is meant to be the end game dungeon hence the reasoning its the last one that becomes available the gear is supposed to be a badge of accomplishment.

Non-argument argument. So was Sorrow’s Furnace, Tombs, & Urgoz’s… But guess what happened when new bigger dungeons with much more “universally appealing” rewards got added. Guess what’s going to happen next week when the new completely “unique rewards” Dungeon gets added. There is a flawed development pattern here that you can’t argue with. Sorry.

Today’s “epic gear” is tomorrow’s Kanaxai Axe so the time invested better darn well match the quantity of “timeless” rewards.

I think all the relevant points have been brought up. Most of the other explorables have been brought up.

I kind of hoped that during the BWE’s the dungeon mob health issues would be reduced with better builds, more gear and more levels, but even with consumables and good builds the fights take too long even against just the trash mobs.

Steele.2784:

The reason for Arah’s difficulty and length is because it is meant to be the end game dungeon hence the reasoning its the last one that becomes available the gear is supposed to be a badge of accomplishment.

There are many ways to increase the length of a dungeon. A relatively small dungeon can be made lengthy if all the enemies and bosses in it have large health pools (Hello Ascalon Catacombs!).

Alternatively, you can simply litter a dungeon with trash patrols, and also draw out the length.

But perhaps the best way to make a dungeon longer, is by actually building a bigger dungeon, without all the giant health pool gimmicks. Or by effectively reusing rooms, instead of breezing through each space in mere seconds.

Arah is designed to be like this though, most of you are missing the point when anet said arah is ment to be for the high tier speed clear runners from GW1 giving them some much more challenging content. they have actually said that arah is designed so that you shouldn’t be able to PUG it. With that being said with a good team path 3 can be done in around 30 min. Path 2 can take from 45-75 min. Path 1 Can be done in 60-90 and well path 4 well ya path 4 takes a few hours it’s just long. but if they made the dungeon easier than you get a new wave of people complaining about how there is nothing challenging at end game. I’d rather have hard end game than no end game at all wouldn’t you?

Pritst.1469:

I’d rather have hard end game than no end game at all wouldn’t you?

No, I would rather have fun end game (even if its easy), than annoying end game.

Sorrow’s Furnace in GW1 was easy, but my guild still enjoyed doing it, because it was fun.
I think fun is more important than difficulty.

I would go for the fun and I dont like skiping content to make fast runs (but i have to). But if Arah is to be the climax of dungeons, as mentioned above, Anet should not make it necessary to craft legendary weapons because its unfair to players that need for example AC or CoF shards.

If there is the need for a super hard dungeon to make dungeon fans happy, wich i agree, then dont make it’s shards necessary for the legendary.

if you get… dangerously cheesy, you can complete path 3 in 16 minutes. 25-30 minutes otherwise.
I fully believe path 1 is doable within 30 if there are no lupicus wipes.
Path 2 can take upwards of an hour
and Path 4 I’ve never tried to speedrun because I dont really see the point. 180 tokens a day is enough for me.

Pritst.1469:

Arah is designed to be like this though, most of you are missing the point when anet said arah is ment to be for the high tier speed clear runners from GW1 giving them some much more challenging content.

The reason we were speedclearing places was for the rare loot SPECIFICALLY found in those areas (ectos/gems/obby shards)

In guild wars 2, NOTHING specific is found in arah other than tokens, they even diminish after several runs in a day!

It is stupid to think we want to speedclear a place with little value, and believe me if it was worth it, people would be speed clearing the snoozefests already.

At least people still killed all the spiders in Fissure of Woe, because there was a high chance they would drop Obsidian Shards. A skippable mob, yet players would take a small detour to kill them anyway (although to be fair, there also was one enemy at the beach that required killing for 100% completion). Same for a lot of the shadow patrols, because all of them could drop shards. In GW2, there really aren’t any drops to look forward to from regular mobs.

Maybe if they dropped ectos and shards we would be more interested in not skipping them?

glad i’m not the only one thinking this. I hate seeing the same argument defending Anet’s idiot designed dungeons

To call them “idiot designed dungeons” is perhaps a bit harsh. I think the dungeons were designed by very talented and insightful people, but they perhaps miscalculated how much enjoyment people would get from this kind of content. I also suspect that some of the dungeon content might have been rushed to meet deadlines, which is a shame if that were to be true.

Given more production time, and taking into account all the feedback from this and other forums, I’m confident the team can deliver much better dungeons. Hopefully all dungeons will receive an overhaul in due time.

Steele.2784:

The reason for Arah’s difficulty and length is because it is meant to be the end game dungeon hence the reasoning its the last one that becomes available the gear is supposed to be a badge of accomplishment.

Ok about the difficulty, but the lenght just makes it inviable… for example, I logged in today, found a group, we enter the dungeon and the server kicks me out. I relogged and appeared outside, and the zone was contested, so there was no way for me to enter the dungeon. So I started helping with the events to regain control of the doors, but suddenly, I realised that, by the time I finished, I would still have to spend 2-3 hours doing route 2 or whatever…. so I logged off. It’s very difficult to find 3-4 hours of uninterrupted gameplay during the week…..

I think that somebody from Anet should comment this topic so players could have a glance about future developments of Arah, since almost all players which i talked to agreed about this subject and this post is a reflection of this agreement.

Make more dungeons that take 2-3 hours to complete, remove or remake 20 min dungeons, they are almost waste of time and boring, yes very boring after 5th time…
Short = worthless

Its not the dungeon is to long its the wps to the fights should be right next to the boss and no walk back. like people are saying we need to farm this dungeon and arena net are treating it like its a privlage to run it or something . I dont knwo if its just me or what but like 1200 shards for your set plus 500 for legndary and u get to the lupi fight and thats when the runs are over know one absolutely know one wants to run back 30 times and spend 1 gold just to beat the boss thats bugged and one hits ya when u are clearly out of the red aoe its a joke cant even get a run formed up basicly begging the people that dont really know the fight just to get there and die over and over and over i think i hate it.

We should not need “tricks” to “skip” things to make runs faster. Make it reasonable to run the place while killing everything along the way.